Brookville

By Craig T. Chappelow and Donald L. Dunaway

Platted in 1808 on a strip of land between the confluence of the East and West Forks of the Whitewater River, Brookville is one of the oldest and most picturesque towns in Indiana. The authors have assembled more than 200 historic postcards, contributed by local residents and collectors, that tell the story of Brookville’s people and places. Many of the scenes depicted in Brookville postcards show homes, busy factories, and rural scenes that have long since disappeared. Browsing through these images gives an indication of the way Brookville used to be. Others scenes are easily recognizable today and show how the citizens of the town have preserved some of its most important landmarks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jan 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439618998

Craig T. Chappelow

Donald L. Dunaway is the Franklin County historian and has been active in Franklin County and Brookville history for more than 40 years. Craig T. Chappelow has been collecting vintage Brookville postcards for more than 25 years.

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INTRODUCTION

Postcards were first available for purchase in Brookville around 1873, and they were a far cry from the postcards used today. At that time, the only postcards permitted to be mailed were those produced and sold by the federal government, and the only place you could buy one was at the post office. They came with the stamps already printed on them, were blank on both sides, and the sender had to write the recipient’s name and address on one side and their message on the other. In 1898, an act of Congress allowed private printers to produce and sell postcards. To make them more interesting, printers created these postals, as they were called, with a small image on the message side, thus starting a massive collection craze that would last for years.

By the beginning of the 20th century, postcard collecting in Brookville, as in other parts of the world, was nearly a mania. Between 1895 and 1920, a staggering 300 billion postcards were produced and sold worldwide. If you visited almost any home in Brookville at that time, you would probably spend at least a few minutes enjoying your host’s collection of postcards. They might be neatly organized in an album or just piled on a table in the parlor. For the residents of Brookville, postcard collecting was an ideal hobby for hard-working people who had little time and less money to devote to creating a collection of anything more elaborate. Postcards were incredibly cheap (one penny to buy, another penny to mail), took up little space, and were widely available in many shops in town.

In order to understand this phenomenon, we must suspend our modern perspective of the postcard as something we send a friend or relative when we go on vacation. (Imagine the Statue of Liberty gleaming against a cloudless blue sky or the Golden Gate Bridge partially shrouded in fog.) This modern-day postcard is always taken by professionals and mass-produced in splendid color—a record of where we have been. By comparison, an early postcard collection in Brookville might have a few examples of some out-of-town locations, but many of the cards were local scenes—a record of where we are. Many of the postcards were never mailed, indicating that collectors would buy the cards to keep. Brookville citizens would peruse the postcard racks at shops like Gus Baither’s variety store or Citizens’ Drug Store eager to purchase the latest postcard made of a local scene or rural view.

Another reason for the popularity of postcards in Brookville was functional. Almost no private homes in the area had telephones until after World War I. The telegraph, in use from 1860 to 1915, was expensive and used mainly for business. Letter writing was for the elite, not the ordinary citizen, and for women more than men. The postcard served as primary means of communication for the common people. It was a cheap way to communicate and, compared to today’s postal service, incredibly quick. It was expected for a postcard, mailed from Brookville in the morning, to arrive at the recipient’s home in Cincinnati the same afternoon. The creation of rural free delivery in 1901 ensured daily delivery to families in the country, and it was possible that in-town residents sometimes received deliveries two or three times on the same day. As proof of this efficiency, there are numerous cards in our collections that carried brief messages telling the recipient to pick them up the next morning at the train station or asking them if they plan to visit the day after tomorrow. In their role as precursor to the telephone in Brookville and for their popularity as a collectible, postcards thrived.

Most of the postcards in this book are from 1905 to 1930, and are one of two types: picture postcards or real-photo postcards. Picture postcards made up the vast majority of postcards created during this time period. They were mass-produced by mechanical printing using letterpress halftones and created by professional printing houses. They typically featured a town’s most prominent sites—in Brookville’s case it was usually the Franklin County Courthouse or a scene along the Whitewater River—and marketed to tourists or collectors. The majority of these cards were produced in Germany because its printing methods were far superior to anything in the United States. One prominent producer of Brookville postcards was the Kraemer Art Company, founded in 1902 on Fountain Square in Cincinnati. All the color postcards produced by Kraemer were printed at its facility in Berlin. Other common publishers of Brookville cards were the Art Manufacturing Company of Amelia, Ohio, and Auburn Post Card Manufacturing Company of Auburn, Indiana.

The other form of postcards, called real-photo, are more intriguing and rarer. These cards were produced for one individual buyer at a time. The buyer would provide an original photograph made from film negatives or glass plates to a local shopkeeper, drugstore employee, or professional photographer. Using photographic equipment in their shop, they would reproduce the photograph onto heavy, sensitized photo stock and cut it to postcard size. These real-photo postcards were produced in very small batches of a dozen or less and sometimes just a single postcard. They were produced for ordinary people and feature more everyday scenes and subjects important to that individual, like a family portrait or exterior shot of one’s house. The image quality varied greatly from amateurish snapshot to studio perfection.

Many of the postcards in this book were made from photographs taken by Benjamin Franklin Winans of Brookville. Winans was a printer all his life, from the age of 15 until he died just short of 90 in 1949. He called his print shop Winans’ Printery. He took up the art of photography in 1902, and this became a sideline in his business. Fortunately, Winans wrote captions and dates on the envelopes for the negatives. Most of his photographic works are from 1902 to 1916 with a few dating to 1926. His collection of glass negatives and acetate negatives have been the subject of interest for Donald L. Dunaway,